Thanksgiving 2018

It’s a good time to give thanks to (and for!) all the people who come up with things new and intriguing–whether by accident or design, whether directed or random, whether paid or free, whether looking to make a mint or happy with the pleasure of finding things out.

And it’s a good time, too, to give thanks to (and for!) all the people who are willing to work with and for and on behalf of people and their new and interesting things to improve things in this mysterious and strangely ever-giving world of ours.

Introducing new things into established orders turns out to be not all that easy. Established orders have their own rationales for why they are what they are, and have their own plans for how they will change. New things coming in from outside, or leaving from the inside, don’t set so well.

We should give thanks, too, to all the smugglers and enablers and facilitators and defectors and cheaters and those that look the other way and those that choose not to comply or force compliance, and even those that repeat unfounded myths about innovation and federal law and policy, and those who by their own accidents of administration set the stage for others to mess with established orders.

It’s a big wide weird world. Stuff gets done anyway, despite the urge to own and manage, despite mania for process and procedures, despite ideology and despite anarchy, despite IP and despite open, despite selfishness and despite altruism. It seems that we humans have been on a hunt for new tools since before we were fully conscious of our hunt.

So, thanks for the desire to hunt, to be gruntled, to be enough curious and desirous and optimistic that we keep pushing our imaginations, our ability to observe, our making records of what we observe, and reasoning, stumbling, fighting, and cooperating our way to new things drawn from the apparently endless frontier of what the world must be, despite whatever appearances it may have at first and later habitual glance.